Ru Freeman

Author & Activist

Authors

Corban Addison is the author of two international bestselling novels, A Walk Across the Sun and The Garden of Burning Sand, which together have been published in over 20 countries. His forthcoming novel, The Tears of Dark Water, will be released in the fall of 2015. In addition to being a writer, Addison is a litigation attorney and a supporter of human rights and social justice causes around the world. He holds degrees in law and engineering, and lives with his family in Virginia.

Mariana Aitches taught American and Native Studies for 35 years. She has tried to emulate great teachers like Edward Said in making students conscious of and responsible for peace and justice. She is the author of two collections of poetry and is currently working on a history of the San Antonio government housing project where she grew up.

Kazim Ali’s books include four volumes of poetry, The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, Bright Felon and Sky Ward; three novels, Quinn’s Passage, The Disappearance of Seth and Wind Instrument; andthree collections of essays, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence, Fasting for Ramadan and Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine. He has translated work by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi and Marguerite Duras. He is the editor of collections on the work of Jean Valentine and Agha Shahid Ali. He is on the faculty of Oberlin College.

Xhenet Aliu’s fiction and essays have appeared in journals such as Glimmer Train, Hobart,The Barcelona Review, Necessary Fiction, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, and she has received multiple scholarships, grants, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, among others. Her debut fiction collection, Domesticated Wild Things and Other Stories, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and was released in September 2013. A native of Waterbury, Connecticut, she currently lives in Athens, Georgia, after recent stints in New York City, North Carolina, Montana, and Utah.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, and critic who teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include After Jews and Arabs,Memories of Our Future, Islanders, and neither wit nor gold: from then. His translations include Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias by Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović. A 10th anniversary edition of from the warring factions, and new essays, a little history, was published in 2013. He is the General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student and guest edited archival texts emerging from the New American Poetry.

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist and translator. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s last prose book In the Presence of Absence(Archipelago Books, 2011) won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. His translation of his second novel, The Corpse Washer, won the 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Literary Translation. He is an associate professor at New York University.

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian writer and journalist. She was born in Taybat al-Muthallath, Palestine, in 1974 and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at Freiburg where she completed an MA in Islamic Studies and German and English Literature. She is the New York correspondent for al-Araby al-Jadeed and is co-editor and editor of the Arabic page of Jadaliyya. She has published essays, short stories, and two novels; Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleep Thief) (Beirut, al-Jamal, 2011) and Sifr al-Ikhtifaa (The Book of Disappearance) (Beirut, al-Jamal, 2014.)

Kafah Bachari is a short story writer, poet, and aspiring novelist. She lives in Houston Texas, with her two young sons and teaches business law at the University of Houston Law Center. Currently she is at work on her first novel, Azadistan.

Frank Barat is a human rights activists and author. He was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and is now the president of the Palestine Legal Action Network. His books include: Gaza in Crisis (2010), Corporate complicity in Israel’s occupation (2011) and On Palestine (2012). He can be contacted @frankbarat22 on twitter.

Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award. His next novel, Scrapper, will be published in Fall 2015.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a writer and poet. His collection, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Award. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, received a 2010 NAACP Image Award. He has won a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship and a Ruth Lily Fellowship. He is the national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, and was appointed to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by President Barack Obama. He studies law Yale. His latest collection is Bastards of the Reagan Era.

Chana Bloch’sSwimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2015 includes selections from her four earlier collections, The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey, as well as new work. Bloch is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs and of Israeli poets Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two NEA fellowships, the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Bloch is Professor Emerita of English at Mills College.

Nate Brown is the web editor of American Short Fiction and has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Vermont Studio Center, the KHN Center for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and multiple work-study scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Five Chapters, the Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he coordinates the PEN/Faulkner Foundation’s Writers in Schools program in Baltimore City Public Schools.

Hayan Charara was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1972, the son of Lebanese immigrants. His first book of poems, The Alchemist’s Diary, was published in 2001, followed by The Sadness of Others in 2006. His most recent book is Something Sinister, forthcoming in 2016. He editedInclined to Speak (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry, and his children’s book, The Three Lucys (2015), won the New Voices Award Honor. He lives in Texas.

Teju Cole is a novelist, art historian, photographer, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. He was born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, a national bestseller and New York Times Editors’ Pick; and a novel, Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Rosenthal Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is Photography Critic for the New York Times Magazine, and is currently working on a book about Lagos.

Michael Collier’s books of poetry include An Individual History (2012) and The Ledge (2000), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a translation of Medea (2006) and a collection of essays, Make Us Wave Back (2007). He edited the anthologies The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry (1993) and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (2000). His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and an Academy Award in Literature. He served as Poet laureate of Maryland from 2001-2004, and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He teaches at the University of Maryland.

Ted Conover is the author of The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World (Vintage, 2011), and other books including Rolling Nowhere, Coyotes,and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Newjack won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Ramola D is the author of Temporary Lives (2009) winner of the AWP Grace Paley Award in Short Fiction, 2008, and Invisible Season (1998), co-winner of the 1998 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Poetry award. She is a recipient of a 2005 NEA Poetry Fellowship, and her work has appeared in Greensboro Review, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Northwest Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Best American Poetry 1994, Best American Fantasy 2007, Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington DC Women Writers (2006), and All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (2014)..

Marlene Dumas is an internationally renowned painter recognised for her contribution to the development of painting and for her visual critiques of racial, sexual and social issues through her work. She has succeeded in lending pictorial form to the fragility of existence, to feelings of fear and anxiety but also of commitment love and hope. Her work has been shown in retrospectives in Japan, South Africa and the US. Her last retrospective, ‘The Image as Burden,’ began in Amsterdam (2014) and travelled to Londen and Basel. A new edition of her publication, Sweet Nothings: Notes and Texts was published in 2014.

Duranya Freeman has worked as a journalist for Sri Lanka’s The Nation, and as a staff writer for two of Colorado College’s student publications, the Cipher and the Catalyst. She was selected by the South Asian Journalists Association for a Fellowship which lead her to research and write the stories of the LTTE-cadres who went through the post-war rehabilitation program in Sri Lanka. She is a freshman at Colorado College who is studying public health policy and post-conflict initiatives.

Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer, activist, and speaker. Her graduate work focussed on female migrant labor in the Middle East, and she has worked in the fields of international social justice, and humanitarian and disaster relief programs. Her novels A Disobedient Girl (2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (2013), appear in multiple translations. Her second novel won the 2014 winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman, and is long-listed for the Impac Dublin Literary Award. She blogs for the Huffington Post on literature and politics.

Tess Gallagher is the author of nine volumes of poetry including Dear Ghosts, Amplitude, and Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (2011).Her fiction includes The Man from Kenvara: Selected Stories. She also authored Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray, and A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry. She spearheaded the publication of Raymond Carver’s Beginners as a single volume. She companioned the production of the film “Birdman,” directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, which uses the work of Raymond Carver. She divides her time between Lough Arrow in Co. Sligo in the West of Ireland and Port Angeles, Washington.

Cristina García is the author of six novels, two anthologies, works for young readers, and a collection of poetry. Her latest book, King of Cuba, is a darkly comic portrait of Fidel Castro. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She’s taught at universities nationwide and recently moved to the Bay Area.

Suzanne Gardinier is the author of five books, most recently Iridium & Selected Poems 1986-2009.In 2003 she served on a panel at the American Studies Association annual meeting on “American Jews, Israel, and the Palestinian Question,” with Carolyn Karcher, Amy Lang, & Irena Klepfisz. She has trained teachers from Teachers College and from Bank Street College of Education in the teaching of writing and in discussing race in the classroom; since 1994 she’s taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where she now serves as resident director of the Sarah Lawrence Program in Cuba. She lives in Manhattan and Havana.

David Gorin’s poetry and prose have appeared in A Public Space, The Believer, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Dorot Fellowship in Israel, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He works as a poetry blogger for the Boston Review and as a doctoral student in English Literature at Yale University, where he teaches poetry writing and curates the WAVEMACHINE reading series.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) Names (Norton, 2010), andDesesperanto (Norton, 2003) ,an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010), and thirteen collections of translations from the French.DiaspoRenga, a collaborative sequence written with Deema Shehabi, was published by Holland Park Press in 2014. She has received two Lambda Literary Awards, the PEN award for poetry in translation, the PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco. She lives in Paris.

Nathalie Handal’s recent books include The Republics, which Patricia Smith lauds as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers;” the bestselling The Invisible Star, which explores the city of Bethlehem and the lives of its exiles worldwide; Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times says is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” Her most recent plays have been produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey in London.

Jane Hirshfield’s most recent, eighth poetry collection is The Beauty, published along with Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, both Knopf, 2015. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, her honors include The California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and NEA, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, TLS, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry.

Fanny Howe has written numerous books of fiction, essays and poetry and has won the Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. Her most recent collection of poetry Second Childhood, a Finalist for the National Book Award 2014, was published by Graywolf Press.

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestselling essay collection, and a novel, The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and the New York Times, where she is a regular columnist for the Sunday Book Review. She was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Kim Jensen is a Baltimore-based writer, poet, and political activist whose books include, TheWoman I Left Behind, Bread Alone, and The Only Thing that Matters. Her fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies. Active in the peace and justice movement for many years, especially the struggle for Palestinian liberation, Kim is associate professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County. She is married to the Palestinian painter and educator Zahi Khamis, and was visiting with family in Palestine during the latest assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014.

Lawrence Joseph is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He is also the author of two books of prose, Lawyerland (FSG) and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose (University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series). He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Michigan Law School. His work has been widely anthologized, and translated into several languages. He is Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law, in New York City.

Nancy Kricorian is a New York City-based writer and activist. Her most recent novel, All The Light There Was, is set in the Armenian community of Paris during World War II. Her honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, The Anahid Literary Award, a Gold Medal of the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Daniel Varoujan Prize of the New England Poetry Club. In 2010 she traveled throughout the West Bank as part of the Palestine Festival of Literature. Kricorian has been on the staff of CODEPINK Women for Peace since 2003.

Laila Lalami’s books include the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, longlisted for the Orange Prize and The Moor’s Account, a New York Times Notable Book and a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, the Guardian, the New York Times, and many anthologies. Her awards include a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn (University of Pittsburg Press, 2015), selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of many honors, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Creative Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems appear widely, including Poetry magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times, Kenyon Review and Boston Review. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, he currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Kiese Laymon is a black southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University before graduating from Oberlin College. He earned an MFA from Indiana University and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Vassar College. Laymon is the author of the novel, Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He has two books forthcoming from Scribner.

Farid Matuk is the author of This Is a Nice Neighborhood (2010) and My Daughter La Chola (2013). His work has recently be recognized with an &Now Award for Innovative Writing and the Headlands Center for the Arts Alumni New Works Award. Matuk serves on the editorial team at Fence and as contributing editor for The Volta. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson with the poet Susan Briante and their daughter.

Colum McCann is the author of six novels and three collections of stories, including Thirteen Ways of Looking (2014). His honors include the 2009 National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, the International Dublin Impac Prize in 2011, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. His work has been published in over 35 languages. He lives in New York with his wife, Allison, and their three children. He teaches at the MFA program in Hunter College.

Christopher Merrill’s books include the poetry collection Watch Fire, several edited volumes of translations, and the non-fiction book,Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. His latest book, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, chronicles travels in Malaysia, China and Mongolia, and the Middle East. His work has been translated into over thirty languages. His honors include a Chevalier from the French government in the Order of Arts and Letters. He directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, and the National Council on the Humanities.

Askold Melnyczuk’s first novel, What Is Told, was a New York Times Notable Book; his second, The Ambassador of the Dead, was selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times; the most recent,The House of Widows, was chosen by the American Libraries Association’s Booklist as an Editor’s Choice. Founding editor of Agni and Arrowsmith Press, he’s taught at Harvard and Boston University and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston and in the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars.

Claire Messud is the author of four novels and a book of novellas. Her novel The Emperor’s Children, an international bestseller, was chosen as one of the New York Times’ top ten books of 2006. Her most recent novel, The Woman Upstairs, was long-listed for Canada’s Giller Prize, the IMPAC Award and France’s Prix Fémina. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times, she teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College, CUNY, and lives with her family in Cambridge, MA.

Philip Metres is the author of a number of books and chapbooks, including Sand Opera (2015), A Concordance of Leaves (2013), abu ghraib arias(2011), To See the Earth (2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007). His work has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Watson Fellowship, five Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. He is professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland. http://www.philipmetres.com

Tomás Q. Morín’s poetry collection A Larger Country was the winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He is co-editor with Mari L’Esperance of the anthology, Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, as well as the translator of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu.

Peter Mountford’s novel A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism won the 2012 Washington State Book Award in fiction, and his second novel The Dismal Science, released in 2014 by Tin House Books, was a NYT editor’s choice. His work has appeared in Boston Review, The Atlantic, Granta, The Sun, ZYZZYVA, the Southern Review, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently the events curator at Hugo House, Seattle’s writing center, and he is on faculty at Sierra Nevada College’s MFA program.

Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of the short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile (2007), a collection of short-stories about the Palestinian American community. Her second collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, received the 2014 AWP Grace Paley Award and will be published in 2016. Her work appears in several anthologies, including Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction and Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. She is a recipient of a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. She teaches at the Johns Hopkins University Advanced Academic Program in Creative Writing.

Mary Jane Nealon, RN, MFA is the author of two collections of poetry: Rogue Apostle and Immaculate Fuel, both from Four Way Books in New York. Her memoir, Beautiful Unbroken, won the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction and was published by Graywolf Press in 2011. She is the Director of Innovation at Partnership Health Center in Missoula, Montana.

Dina Mohammed Omar is a writer and graduate student in medical anthropology at Yale University. She is a founding member of National Students for Justice in Palestine and served on the National Executive Board for the Palestine Youth Movement (2010-2011). She teaches English and creative writing in high schools, universities, and prisons and is committed to building community through the collective writing process. Her writing is published in the Believer Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Mizna, and Yellow Medicine Review. She is from Ramoun, Palestine.

Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic, author of Feminist Revision and the Bible (1992), The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994) and For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book (2007). Her most recent books of poetry are The Book of Seventy(2009), The Book of Life: Selected jewish Poems 1979-2011) (2012), and The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog (2014). She is a Chancellor of the Academy of american Poets.

Ed Pavlic’s next books are Let’s Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015) and ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (Fordham University Press, 2015). Recent works are Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009, Kwani? Trust, 2013) and Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (U Georgia P, 2008). He teaches at the University of Georgia.

Roger Reeves poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, andTin House, among others. Reeves was awarded a 2015 Whiting Award, a 2014-2015 Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a 2013 Pushcart Prize, a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. King Me, (2013) his first book of poems, won the 2014 Larry Levis Reading Prize and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Alice Rothchild retired from her professorship at Harvard Medical School in November 2013 and is now a Corresponding Member of the Faculty of the medical school. She co-founded and co-chairs American Jews for a Just Peace Boston, co-organizes the AJJP Health and Human Rights Project, and is on the coordinating committee of Jewish Voice for Peace Boston. She is the author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience (2007). In 2013 she released a documentary film, “Voices Across the Divide.”

George Saunders is the author of eight books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection). He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of three books of poems: Primary Source (2016, Red Hen Press, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award), Striking Surface (2010, Ashland Poetry Press, winner of the Richard Snyder Prize) and Sublimation Point (2004, Four Way Books). He is Associate Editor of Painted Bride Quarterly and Poetry Editor of Bellevue Literary Review. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and lives in Brooklyn.

Sarah Schulman is the author of 17 books including Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (Duke, 2012) and the novel The Cosmopolitans (Feminist Press, 2016). Her awards include a Guggenheim in Playwrighting and a Fulbright in Judaic Studies. Sarah is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and is faculty advisor to Students for Justice in Palestine at the CUNY College of Staten Island where she is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.

Alan Shapiro is author of 12 books of poetry (most recently Reel to Reel and Night of the Republic, a finalist for both the National Book Award and The Griffin Prize), 4 books of prose (including Broadway Baby, a novel from Algonquin Books). Winner of he Kingsley Tufts Award, LA Times Book Prize, an award in literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2 NEAs, a Guggenheim and a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, he is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Robert Shetterly is a Maine-based artist. He obtained his undergraduate training in English Literature at Harvard, and taught in southern West Virginia before relocating to Maine. In 2002 he gave up his career as a surrealist painter and illustrator to begin the Americans Who Tell the Truth project, an on-going series of portraits – now over 200 – of Americans from the past & present who have struggled for social, economic, racial and environmental justice. The portraits, which travel to schools, colleges, museums, and libraries all over the country, are meant to provide people wih role models of citizenship.

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of many books, including The Turtle of Oman, Transfer, Habibi, Sitti’s Secrets, 19 Varieties of Gazelle, and Going Going. A childhood resident of Ferguson, Mo., she has also lived in Palestine, and San Antonio, TX, and travels all over the world as a visiting writer.

Tom Sleigh’s books include the poetry collections Station Zed, ArmyCats, winner of the John Updike Award, and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost, and a translation of Euripides’ Herakles. His work appears in TheNew Yorker,Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, and The Pushcart Anthology and elsewhere. His honors include the PSA’s Shelley Prize, awards from the American Academy in Berlin, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lila Wallace Fund, the Guggenheim and NEA. He teaches in Hunter College’s MFA program.

Ahdaf Soueif’s workincludes the Booker shortlisted The Map of Love, the non-fiction books, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, an account of events in Egypt, and Cairo: a City Transformed, and a translation of Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah. She founded Engaged Events, a UK based charity, whose first project was the annual Palestine Festival of Literature held in occupied Palestine and Gaza. She was shortlisted for the Liberty Human Rights Award, and has won the Metropolis Bleu, the Constantin Cavafy Award, and the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Award. She was named to the list of 100 people with most influence on the English reading public (Guardian) and100 most powerful women in the Arab world (Arabian Business)

Adam Stumacher’s fiction has appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, TriQuarterly, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere, and won the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. He holds degrees from Cornell University and Saint Mary’s College and was a fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He has lived in the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia, and he has many years experience as a teacher in inner city high schools, for which he was awarded the Sontag Prize in Urban Education. He is working on a short story collection and a novel.

William Sutcliffe is the author of six novels, including the international bestseller, Are You Experienced? and The Wall, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. His novels have been translataed into twenty-five languages. Concentr8 will be published by Bloomsbury USA in 2016

Janne Teller is a New York based Danish novelist and essayist of Austrian-German origin. Her books include Odin’s Island, and the bestseller Nothing. Her prize winning passport book about life as a refugee, War – What If it Were Here, she adapts to each country where it’s published. Among her awards are the Michael L. Printz Honor Award for Literary excellency and the Drassow’s Peace Prize. Her work is translated into more than 25 languages. She is an international speaker, who has worked for the UN and EU on conflict resolution worldwide, and today a member of the Jury of the German Peace Prize.

Philip Terman’s is the author of five books of poetry, including Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press, 2015).His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Sun Magazine, Tikkun, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry, and 99 Poems for the 99 Percent. He teaches at Clarion University, and is co-director of The Chautauqua Writers Festival.

Diego Vázquez Jr is a poet, novelist, storyteller. He comes from indigenous migrants who crossed invisible lines to become immigrants under a common sky. He has never met an illegal human. Vázquez is grateful for his ongoing participation in The Women’s Writing Program at the Ramsey County Correctional Facility and the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River. This remarkable experience allows him new insights into the strength and joy of the human heart. Vázquez is the author of Growing Through the Ugly. He is completing work on a forthcoming novel, Border Town Sky.

Alice Walker is a writer, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award. Her works include The Temple of My Familiar, By The Light of My Father’s Smile, and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), which was made into a documentary film, “Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women,” a collaboration with British-Indian filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, and We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness.

Steve Willey lives in Whitechapel, London, and is the author of Elegy (Veer Press, 2013). His ongoing project. Living In, has been published as ‘Slogans’ in Better Than Language (Ganzfeld Press, 2011), as ‘Signals: Letters to Palestine’ in Dear World and Everyone In It (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), and as ‘Mirror: Flag’ in Spiral Orb Nine (2014). In 2013 Steve completed doctoral work on the subject of ‘Bob Cobbing 1950-1978: Poetry Performance and the Institution’ (awarded, 2013). He was the Summer Resident at the University of Arizona Poetry Center (August, 2014). He blogs at www.stevewilley.com and Tweets @swilley17.

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the forthcoming book of poems Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016). He is a Cave Canem graduate and received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry, The Southern Review, West Branch and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing from the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the novel Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Award, and collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won theBOCAS Prize for Caribbean Fiction, and placed her on the National Book Foundation 5Under35 list. TheBoston Globe chose her as one of sixteen cultural figures to watch out for. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is a professor in the MFA program at the New School.

Clarence Young (at times Zig Zag Claybourne) is the author of the novels By All Our Violent Guides, Neon Lights, and Historical Inaccuracies. His essays, poems and short stories have appeared in a variety of places but not, as yet, Oprah’s desk. He is a lifetime resident of Detroit but enjoys the wandering soul given everyone at birth. As such, violence, no matter what form it takes, baffles him. He can be reached via his website www.writeonrighton.com or his woefully neglected blog thingsididatworktoday.blogspot.com.